June 2007

CUH2A Goes Live

International AEP firm CUH2A partnered with us to create a web site that represents the innovation and passionate thinking of their firm. Collaboratively we developed a site that I like to describe as a beautiful harmonic tag cloud. While I’m hoping this site will gain recognition in the design community for its unique interaction and elegant presentation, I’m writing this post to talk about some of the things that are happening behind the scenes that make this site truly cutting edge. Great technology is invisible and this site has a lot of invisibles to talk about.

  • It’s pretty obvious that the site is an Adobe Flash™ experience, but what is unique is that the programming is pulling HTML and XML from a really cool .Net CMS called Sitecore. We’re big fans of this product. It’s solid, scalable, and integrates well with any .Net environment. This is one of those CMS systems where the content editors navigate and edit by browsing the actual site, so there’s very little CMS interface that needs to be learned. We’re big fans.
  • Because the entire site is actually HTML / XML it is fully text browser viewable and therefore search engine friendly.
  • There is only one site, no mirror sites to worry about. Links from search engines load right up in the Player. These days we’re convinced is ubiquitous so the site checks for the plugin and attempts to install it if it’s missing or an older version.
  • Individual pages can be bookmarked. We find this is often a deal breaker when considering programming a -only site. Especially a site that catalogs hundreds of client projects.
  • Back and Next buttons on the web browser work as expected. How cool is that?
  • The scrollwheel is supported on both Windows and Macintosh platforms.
  • And check out how project detail pages (or any content page for that matter) print. Beyond the beautiful print layout, having seamless integration between the interface and the browser’s print function is pretty cool.

I want to give kudos where they are due; Lance Rutter, Glenn Blicharz, Timothy Mills, Mike Bingaman, Alex Lemanski, Nate Striedinger, and Jeff Vandenbussche all did a fantastic job with the innovative development of this application. Nice work guys!

Posted by Joseph Juhnke on June 11, 2007